Does blender have useful skinning tools?
The skinning in blender leaves a bit to be deserved in my opinion but there are some options. In blender this is called weight painting and it uses vertex groups.

For every mesh there is a weight painting mode, where you can manually paint skin weights by painting. There are several tools here to help you out, with extra brush settings in the right settings panel.



In there is also a menu with some extra features.



Or you can manually add/remove/adjust the vertex weights in the edit mode by selecting vertices and adjusting in the right vertex group tab.



There is a paid add-on with extra tools for blender (also 2.8) available here: https://gumroad.com/l/weight_paint_tools